Monday, 5 December 2016

The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists

The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists

Getty
ImagesThe Signing of
the Constitution of the United States, with George Washington, Benjamin
Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson at the Constitutional Convention of 1787; oil
painting on canvas by Howard Chandler Christy, 1940.

The Founding Fathers
had something particular in mind when they set up the U.S. presidential
election system: slavery

… Americans
await the quadrennial running of the presidential obstacle course now known as
the Electoral College
- it’s worth remembering why we have this odd political contraption in the
first place. After all, state governors in all 50 states are elected by popular
vote; why not do the same for the governor of all states, a.k.a. the president?
The quirks of the Electoral College system were exposed [last month] when
Donald Trump secured the presidency with an Electoral College majority, even as
Hillary Clinton took a narrow lead in the popular vote.

Some claim
that the founding fathers chose the Electoral College over direct election in
order to balance the interests of high-population and low-population states.
But the deepest political divisions in America have always run not between big
and small states, but between the north and the south, and between the coasts
and the interior.

One
Founding-era argument for the Electoral College stemmed from the fact that
ordinary Americans across a vast continent would lack sufficient information to
choose directly and intelligently among leading presidential candidates.

This
objection rang true in the 1780s, when life was far more local. But the early
emergence of national presidential parties rendered the objection obsolete by
linking presidential candidates to slates of local candidates and national
platforms, which explained to voters who stood for what.

Although the
Philadelphia framers did not anticipate the rise of a system of national
presidential parties, the 12th Amendment—proposed in 1803 and ratified a year
later— was
framed with such a party system in mind, in the aftermath of the election of
1800-01. In that election, two rudimentary presidential parties—Federalists led
by John Adams and Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson—took shape and squared
off. Jefferson ultimately prevailed, but only after an extended crisis
triggered by several glitches in the Framers’ electoral machinery. In
particular, Republican electors had no formal way to designate that they wanted
Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice president rather than vice
versa. Some politicians then tried to exploit the resulting confusion.

Enter the
12th Amendment, which allowed each party to designate one candidate for
president and a separate candidate for vice president. The amendment’s
modifications of the electoral process transformed the Framers’ framework,
enabling future presidential elections to be openly populist and partisan
affairs featuring two competing tickets. It is the 12th Amendment’s Electoral
College system, not the Philadelphia Framers’, that remains in place today. If
the general citizenry’s lack of knowledge had been the real reason for the
Electoral College, this problem was largely solved by 1800. So why wasn’t the
entire Electoral College contraption scrapped at that point?

Standard
civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon
dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.

At the
Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed
direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James
Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South:
“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the
Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in
the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election
system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half
a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a
prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each
southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in
computing its share of the overall count.

Virginia
emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a
total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more
than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After
the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons
than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves
Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it
would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the
state could actually lose electoral votes.

If the
system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution
was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36
years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.

Southerner
Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner
John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the
decisive margin of victory: without
the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern
states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority.
As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode
into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.

The 1796
contest between Adams and Jefferson had featured an even sharper division
between northern states and southern states. Thus, at the time the Twelfth
Amendment tinkered with the Electoral College system rather than tossing it,
the system’s pro-slavery bias was hardly a secret. Indeed, in the floor debate
over the amendment in late 1803, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher
complained that “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this
House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice
President at the next election.” But Thatcher’s complaint went unredressed.
Once again, the North caved to the South by refusing to insist on direct
national election.

In light of
this more complete (if less flattering) account of the electoral college in the
late 18th and early 19th century, Americans should ask themselves whether we
want to maintain this odd—dare I say peculiar?—institution in the 21st century.

Historians explain how the past
informs the present

Akhil
Reed Amar teaches constitutional law at Yale University. This essay borrows
from his recently published book,The Constitution Today.

We provide
a live link to your original material on your site (and links via social
networking services) - which raises your ranking on search engines and helps
spread your info further!

This site
is published under Creative Commons (Attribution) CopyRIGHT (unless an
individual article or other item is declared otherwise by the copyright
holder). Reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged - if you
give attribution to the work & author and include all links in the original
(along with this or a similar notice).

Feel free
to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you
never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember
attribution!

If you
like what you see, please send a donation (no amount is too small or too large)
or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

Live long
and prosper! Together we can create the best of all possible worlds…

Follow New Illuminati on Twitter

SUBSCRIBE to the NEW ILLUMINATI YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Contact Us

Welcome to the new Enlightenment, an era when suppressed science, hidden history and the enlightening nature of reality are all revealed to those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

These are the thoughts and ideas of New Illuminati - bold forerunners and pioneers of new awareness all over the globe.

Notes on new emerging paradigms from the NEXUS New Times Magazine Founder R. Ayana, who lives in a remote Australian rainforest (and is no longer involved with the magazine) - Catching drops from the deluge in a paper cup since 1984.

§ 107.Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include — (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is OK. Awesome Inc. theme. Powered by Blogger.

Claimer

All opinions, facts, debates and conjectures xpressed herein are xtrusions of macrocosmic consciousness into your field of awareness. The New Illuminati are not to be held responsible or accountable for flashes of insight, epiphany, curiosity, transformation or enlightenment experienced by any person, human or otherwise.